The title of this essay - a phrase taken from his book Rendición de la hora (Surrendering of the Hour, 1996) - points to what I find most distinctive and fundamental in the work of Isidoro Valcárcel Medina. A first reading of the phrase would probably situate it alongside the poetics of the everyday and the currents of art and life that thrived in the 1960s and the early 70s. Indeed, that is the time and context from which his practice emerges, and it is there that we find the knot of problems that runs through his subsequent trajectory as an artist; a trajectory that - in keeping with his original stance - has been characterised by a protean will for a constant shifting of positions. His mature work developed in a conjuncture that would prove extremely fertile in the artistic arena of the late 1960s: the fusion between a formal literalism - associated with Neo-Concretist and Minimalist practices - and what we might call a 'situational literalism', referring to a variety of intermedia practices in which the meaning of a work was no longer contained in the individual pieces, but had to be sought in their function, in their ability to activate an event that exceeded them. This polarity between the extreme literal nature of forms and an equally literal character of the situation, between concrete figures (from geometry to media reification) and the traces of the event (from process to action) generates in its tension the set of questions that the most significant works of the period were grappling with. This was apparent in the international scene, just at that moment when for